Slashdot Mirror
Control the Rain - Cloud Seeding
Zzzt writes "The Times Online reports that Russian president Putin will assure plesant weather at the Russian St. Petersburg 300th anniversary festival by seeding clouds. They plan to shoot dry ice into the clouds to get the moisture to condense prematurely. 'Vladimir Stepanenko, head physicist of St Petersburg's Geophysics Observatory, said: 'Our aim is to empty all clouds of rain before they hit the city borders.'' There is also brief mention of other fun things Russians do with weather control."
The weather no longer controls you :(
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
I seem to remember someone saying that the Americans attempted to use this ploy against the Vietnamese. The vietnamese, being quite good at irrigiation, just irrgated huge areas of land, and the rain just was diverted elsewhere. Can anyone verify this?
All the Russians need is one of Wilhelm Reich's cloudbusters to do whatever they want with the clouds! They'd better make sure they dress up like the Sean Connery weather guy from "The Avengers" movie while they use it.
"But everytime it rains
You're here in my head
Like the sun coming out
Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen" Cloudbusting, by Kate Bush.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"I seem to remember someone saying that the Americans attempted to use this ploy against the Vietnamese. The vietnamese, being quite good at irrigiation"
The combatants in this conflict were the Vietnamese and Americans vs the Soviet Union. Therefore, this was a ploy that the Soviets used against Vietnam and its ally America.
is a hell of lot more than a butterfly flapping its wings in China.
It occurs to me that we could use more research and that maybe we ought to deal with weather modification on an international level (global weather maps, climate history, meteorological cooperation) rather than on a more local one?
Not crying 'Wolf' here but it wouldn't be a bad idea.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
For the good of mother russia you will enjoy a shitty Friday. Dosvidanya!
Man, what a business model...
-Malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
The difference is an important one, and lost on most people. Weather varies from hour to hour, and is fundamentally impossible to predict precisely . Climate is large-scale observations, like how hot the summer will be (in general) and how cold the winter. Predictions of climate are much simpler, and not limited by chaotic interrelations.
Seeding the clouds is not new. The ski mountain where I grew up has been doing it for years to get early snow. It's easy to make a little rain or move it a little upwind; it's probably near impossible to make controllable climatic changes.
We have already made significant climatic changes by emitting greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases. Because climate is such a large-scale phenomenon, those are the sorts of changes that will change it. Changing the climate is a very bad thing, and our changes already threaten to make life on earth considerably less pleasant if we're not careful.
People who don't understand this distinction often wonder how we could predict global warming when we can't predict the weather. The average temperature during a month is a basically a thermodynamic function of incoming solar radiation, thermal reradiation and heat shielding. The chaotic local effects mostly cancel out on larger scales.
I'm sure advances have been since 1952, but I still think I'd avoid St. Petersburg (or at least the outlying villages). It didn't work out so well for the Brits.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
...to calm the waves. And prevent the earthquake by releasing tectonic tensions with few megatonns detonated underground. They should also facade-lift the buildings, clean the rooftops, paint the grass greener in parks and re-locate all unsightly individuals out of city.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it